An expert in oxytocin, the hormone released during birth, Bianca Jones Marlin is determined to have a natural birth — even as the hours of labor add up…
Bianca Jones Marlin is a neuroscientist and postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University. She holds a PhD in neuroscience from New York University, and dual bachelor degrees from St. John’s University, in biology and adolescent education. As a graduate student, with Dr. Robert Froemke, Dr. Marlin examined how the brain adapts to care for a newborn and how a baby’s cry can control adult behavior. Her research focused on the vital bond between parent and child, and studied the use of neurochemicals, such as the “love drug” oxytocin, as a treatment to strengthen fragile and broken parent-child relationships. Dr. Marlin is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Dr. Richard Axel, where she investigates transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, or how traumatic experiences in parents affect the brain structure of their offspring. Her research has been featured in Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, Scientific America and Discover Magazine’s “100 Top Stories of 2015.” She is the recipient of the 2016 Society for Neuroscience Donald B. Lindsley Award, which recognizes the most outstanding PhD thesis in the general area of behavioral neuroscience and was named a STAT Wunderkind in 2017. She is currently a Junior Fellow in the prestigious Simons Society of Fellows. A native New Yorker, Dr. Marlin lives in Manhattan with her scientist husband, Joseph, their daughter, Sage, and their cat Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who is named after the famed neuroanatomist. Her website is www.biancajonesmarlin.com
This story originally aired on Nov. 9, 2018, in an episode titled “Pregnancy“.
Story Transcript
I have a PhD in attraction. I should clarify. More specifically, my doctoral studies looked at the molecule that regulates the laws of attraction, a molecule called oxytocin. You may have heard about it. It’s like the love drug. Nonetheless, it’s released from our bodies during certain things that foster communication, foster connections, like holding hands, eye contact, orgasms, all the way to uterine contractions and milk breastfeeding. So it helps to foster these relationships.
What my doctoral studies looked at was how oxytocin changes a very particular type of attraction, the attraction of a mother to her child.
Oxytocin also has a synthetic. You may have heard of it, Pitocin. If you heard about it not from the medical field maybe because you Googled that on Amazon. You can buy it on Amazon to bolster your sex life. Don’t buy it on Amazon.
But you'll also find it in hospitals because it’s used to speed up birth, speed up labor and induce birth.
What we looked at in our studies was the fact that in mice, we looked at mammals, mice, virgins, they're actually just animals that have never given birth. We call them virgins but their sexual history is their own business. But these virgins, they'll hear the sound of a baby crying and they'll go up to the child, baby mouse, the pup, and either ignore it and leave it to die or they'll eat it. Yes.
But after this virgin mouse finds its true love and white picket fence and gets knocked up, it will no longer cannibalize or leave mice to die. Instead, it will take care of pups crying. This urge is so strong, this attraction is so strong that it will even take care of pups that aren’t its own and it will take care of pups into old age.
And what our studies showed was that when you added oxytocin to virgins, even without them ever having babies, they would do the same task. So oxytocin really made bad moms into good moms and bad babysitters into pretty solid babysitters.
This is pretty close for me in my life because I was blessed enough to be raised by two parents who are also foster parents, so I had foster siblings. I saw my siblings being loved in the family, being loved in my family that my parents didn’t birth them from their body but they birth them from their heart. To see that oxytocin could save the day in that matter really allowed me to dive into my studies. They really were just a big fan of oxytocin.
Then I got pregnant. In my mind I had this all painted out. I was going to be sitting with flowers behind me, like Beyoncé. My basketball belly, I was going to have my husband rub oils on my feet, like organic geranium. My sisters are going to fan my hair as like a rite of passage, and of course I was going to have like a five-hour labor, because anything less than that you can’t brag about. It’s five-hour labor.
I was going to give an all-natural birth, no medication. And my child will come out and we’ll both sing. Then I'd be walking in the halls and walking in Central Park and I'd just flip out my breast and breastfeed my baby underneath the willows, because oxytocin bonding time. I had it all planned out.
So when I went to my obstetrician-gynecologist, who was also at NYU at the time, and I told her this is what my plan was, yeah, she did just that. She laughed in my face.
And I was like, “But I won awards about oxytocin,” and she was like, “You are going to want Pitocin,” the synthetic analog, “because you're going to want this baby to get out.” And I was very firm in not wanting Pitocin. I wanted to see oxytocin operate in real time. I had dedicated so much of my life to setting this molecule. It was my turn to get it to work for me.
And she said I can do whatever I see fit but she recommends Pitocin. And deep down inside I was like, “That’s a dare.” I was in competition with the lady who’s going to be delivering my baby, which is less than ideal.
Nonetheless, Saturday morning came around and I had my first labor pain. It was the same Saturday that I had signed up for an eight-hour Lamaze class for birthing and how to give birth but, whatever. Oxytocin, I got this, right?
So we had our labor pains. My husband and I we walked around. We took pictures of me in labor. We bought champagne. We made sure the bag was packed. We put the timer on because in five hours I was going to have a kid.
Twenty-four hours later, I was still pregnant and in labor.
So that first night he stayed up with me. He did massage my feet with geranium and other like things as I hurled out the food that I ate in the day before, and my body just crushed underneath the pressure of labor pains. I thought, “What is happening? This is not the way Beyoncé made it look.”
So at the thirty-hour time point, they usually suggest that you go in when your contractions are about two minutes apart for two hours. Mine were three minutes. Three minutes apart for thirty hours. So at thirty hours I was over it.
So we got an UberBLACK, jumped into the car and pulled up at NYU. Although I was thirty hours in labor, I was like, “I’m here at NYU. I met oxytocin here, I met my husband here, now I’m going to have my baby here,” took a picture and we got into the Labor and Delivery.
At this point I’m exhausted. Every time a labor pain comes I’m just putting myself into the zone where I’m pulling my head back and forth and humming and telling like, “You're great. It’s okay. You can do it. It’s great. Oh, my gosh, it’s almost over. It’s still two minutes.” It was a whole intense thing.
So I’m in the Labor and Delivery room and they go to check how dilated you are to see how close you are to giving birth. Eight centimeters is like, okay, you're almost close. Nine centimeters, this baby is going to come out. So as the flush of labor pain comes about and I’m hearing the lady next door to me also screaming in pain, and she's like, “Where is my epidural?” Then I hear like plastic crumble, a doctor walk in and she's like, “Ahh.”
And I’m thinking, “I want that.”
My doctor comes up to me and she's like, “So, Bianca, you're two centimeters dilated.” I was going through something called prodromal labor which gives you all the labor benefits, like labor pains, but none of the labor benefits, like dilation.
So we pulled up an UberBLACK and went back home in a yellow cab because the only other option I had was to take Pitocin to initiate the labor, and I was still in competition with the doctor.
On the way home, my husband had already called our family on the way there because five hours is about thirty hours after that, so I walk into my house to find my mom, my dad. Rewind. I walk into my apartment to find my mom, my dad, my sister, her best friend, my other sister, her husband, their one-year-old and my mother-in-law all in the apartment.
At this point I haven't slept in two days. I’m walking to and fro in the hallway like a junk zombie trying to rip all aspects of clothing off my body as my husband runs behind me to throw the robe over because we have company. And that night, he fell asleep because he's been up for two days, and I still had to track all of my labor pains and I saw it at 2:00, 2:05, 2:10, 3:15 all the way to 6:00 being tracked.
Oxytocin was failing me. I dedicated so much of my life to this only to be in labor for longer than I was pregnant is what it felt like.
Day Four rolls around and I’m like this is jokes. We need to go. So we got dumped into another UberBLACK because I’m still having a baby, you guys, and we pull up at NYU. This time no pictures. I’m like, “Get me a wheelchair.” Somehow I’m fairly confident I threaten someone but I was in the room.
I was in the room and I knew it was time when I looked up and twenty medical students walked in because I gave birth in a teaching hospital. And I gave birth in the same teaching hospital I got my PhD in so I recognize some of those faces. And I did not care.
I gave birth to a healthy baby daughter. Her name is Sage. Yeah, she's awesome. They take her out and they put her on you for skin-to-skin contact, because that releases oxytocin. And I've been having oxytocin released for four days. So they put her on my chest and the first thought that came to my mind was, “Get this slimy thing off of me.” Oxytocin.
But I knew that I was going to mommy right and so I made sure I breastfed her, I made sure I did skin to skin, I made sure that I was going to have oxytocin released at all these moments. And six weeks in, after mommying correctly, I woke up to a migraine that was worse than my four days of labor pain. My husband rushed me to the hospital and they immediately admitted me because my blood pressure was through the roof.
I kept on telling the doctor that I had a newborn at home and can you just give me this pain medication so I can go home. What I was wasn’t hearing, which was what he was telling me, was that I had postpartum preeclampsia. It’s marked by high blood pressure that then leads to seizures. He told me that the most tragic thing he had ever seen was a young woman with a newborn baby come in and decide to leave the hospital and who died from seizures.
I was admitted in and for those four days I wasn’t with my daughter. I didn’t breastfeed her. I didn’t have skin-to-skin contact. And I felt that all the work that I had done to prepare for that point was just being erased because oxytocin wasn’t being released.
That fifth night after being away from her for a week, when I did get home and I was able to lay my head on the pillow and go to sleep, I realized that in the hospital I was attached to monitors and I had nurses on 24-hour seizure watch. Although I was flooded with contrast for my MRIs and contrast for my CAT scans and magnesium to keep me from seizing, I was in a safe place.
Though when I got back, I couldn’t breastfeed her because of all the chemicals that were in my body. There was nothing that was hooking me up to anything to know that I was okay. And I couldn’t go to sleep because I know if I wasn’t okay, she wouldn’t be okay.
What I came to realize is that my connection with my daughter, who’s now a year-and-a-half old, isn’t punctuated moments of oxytocin release. It’s our life together. And oxytocin operates in a myriad of interactions, from the doctor who convinced me to stay and saved my life to my friends who were supportive when I left the hospital and couldn’t breastfeed anymore because my milk had dropped, going back to work full time and talking me through not being with my baby.
I realized that every tear I shed when I was in the pump room and I only saw dribbles of milk come out that weren’t going to support my baby, and every time I had to work late and couldn’t be with her, and every time my heart broke for that, that was oxytocin. It was there the whole time.
As scientists we have this way of making sure things are clean and experiments are proper, but that’s not the way life is. We can’t always predict the outcome. What I did learn is that Mother Nature will never leave us hanging. She is a mother after all. Thank you.